Chatbots: Changing the Way Enterprises Communicate

RapidValue

Dec 19, 2017

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What is a Chatbot?

Chatbot, or sometimes just referred to as bots, involves developing an intelligent chat system that can hold meaningful conversations with users. With the evolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Chatbots became the next logical step for businesses to consider.

Why Chatbot for Enterprise?

Chatbot is available 24X7. You never miss that query from a customer and the opportunity to acquire or retain them. Your customers won’t have to read the message, “Our next available agent will get back to you within 24 business hours”. Rather, they get instant service.

Bots can multitask and take the load off from your human task force. Customers would prefer talking to someone rather than go through your endless FAQ section every time they have an issue or a query. While your agents are able to handle few customers at a time, Chatbots can handle many.

These Robo-advisors can suggest the products or services, as per your requirement and the feasibility.

As part of a shift in buying behavior, we see customers more armed with information before they buy. They are looking for easy access to the information that solves their problems and Chatbot will hold the key in the coming days.

Where do You Use Chatbots?

Chatbots converse with humans to provide service and that’s exactly when and where you use them. Look into your organization’s services that have least changes in its process/procedure while requiring more human intervention. Start with the most repetitive tasks with least complexity that can be automated and a trained bot can handle them going forward. You effectively, can make your human task force focus on more complex areas by doing this.

Are you contemplating on using them interactively, capturing customer information? You are thinking on the right track. Organizations have even found Chatbots to be valuable in engaging and retaining talent.

The most common mistake organizations make is to apply Chatbot all over the service you opt for implementation. Chatbot is built based on intelligence and natural language processing. This means that bots, like humans, need to be trained to understand user intentions, rules and procedures. Ideally, you should select few use cases within the service which could benefit from using a Chatbot and develop it. You need a fully conversational bot on a particular topic rather than a bot that talks but provides questionable responses. Add more use cases as you continuously, train your bot.

Chatbot: Behind the Scene

You will need to be aware of different elements required to make a Chatbot work. Chatbot has a mix of components that need to be put in place for it to be effective.

We will need a communication channel where the dialogues/chat will take place such as Skype, Facebook messenger, Slack, etc.

A component is needed to understand the user’s intention from their chats using a plethora of frameworks available for natural language understanding. You can either develop a bot from scratch using Bot Development Frameworks provided by Microsoft, Amazon, etc. or choose to go with an existing platform on which you will develop your bot known as Bot Platforms.

The bot will need access to relevant information from which it can provide the answers.

Training the bot for contextual understanding and responses.

How to Get Started?

Organizations have seen rapid adoption of chatbots in mainstream communication with customers. It is necessary to start quick and yet, there is the need to see if it is a viable solution, before you take the plunge. The best way to start is to do a POC (Proof of Concept) that will help ascertain your understanding and put your ideas into implementation on a small scale, then scale-up eventually.

For a POC, the following steps can be considered:

Discuss with your stakeholders

Initial understanding of the business and a specific service where the bot can be applied.

Identifying the business problem for which the bot can be a suitable solution.

Evaluating specific use cases for human interaction from the business problem.

Defining success criteria for POC.

Based on the above discussion points, the service provider should

Define the goal of the Chatbot.

Design the conversation tree for the Chatbot.

Identify the Chatbot architecture and required bot development framework or bot platform.

Train the Chatbot for a particular area so that it can answer queries by itself.

Deploy and integrate the Chatbot with existing systems for rollout.

Conclusion

Summarizing it, a simple rule for identifying areas where chatbots can be applied is to look for aspects or factors which help you to:

Reduce cost for your organization

Minimize human effort

Reduce time taken to complete a service

If you have any questions on chatbots and how it can digitally transform your organization, You can reach out to me.